Now that the election is over, Pat and I are starting to go through news withdrawals. We aimlessly surf the channels and Huff Post looking for news commentary, but the biggest discussion we could find was about the Obama's choice for pet puppy.

Please, somebody make Dick Cheney come out of his bunker and express an opinion, ANY opinion!

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Question: Why are barber poles white with a red spiral stripe?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: Why is whiskey in America called Bourbon?
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History for 11/8/2008
Birthdays: Roman Emperor Nerva, Bram Stoker, Sir Edmund Halley, June Havoc, Margaret Mitchell, Joe Flynn- the cranky Captain Binghampton in the 60’s TV comedy McHales Navy, Ricky Lee Jones, Bonny Raitt, Dr. Christiaan Barnard, Ester Rolle, Katherine Hepburn., Parker Posey, Gretchen Mol, Tara Reid

1519- Spanish Conquistador Hernan' Cortez first met the Aztec Emperor Montezuma II. Cortes was guided by Malinche', the "Pocahontas of the Aztecs". This noblewoman guided Cortez's little band into the heart of the empire. Conquistador Bernal Diaz described how after dinner the Spaniards were given tobacco pipes to smoke, but a special pipe with different tobacco was given to Montezuma, after smoking it "The Emperor became merry, as we do when drunk with wine.." Cortez was also offered a cup of chocolate, then a bitter brew called Tchocolatl.

1793- In one of the positive results of the Reign of Terror, the French Revolutionary Government opens the royal art collection of the Louvre to the public as a museum.

1880- Famous actress Sarah Bernhardt made her American stage debut in La Dame aux Camelias. She made a further ten tours of the US, all billed as Farewell Appearances.

1887- Dentist-gunfighter Doc Holliday dies of tuberculosis or consumption at 35. He knew he had it for a long time, and in the 1800's it was as irreversible as AIDS is today. So some say this knowledge is what made him such a bold pistolero. But unfortunately for him, he won all his gunfights and died in bed anyway. His last words after taking a shot of whiskey were:" Well I'll be damned!"

1910- Congressman Victor Berger of Wisconsin became the first Socialist to be elected to Congress. Revisionist histories since the Red Scares and the superpower Cold War tend to ignore the achievements of the American Socialist Party. But in the first decades of the 20th century a number of big city mayors and congressmen were socialists. In the 1912 presidential election when Woodrow Wilson won by a slim one million votes third party socialist Eugene Debs polled over a millions votes.

1926- New York Mayor Jimmy Walker, a former vaudeville hoofer who wrote the hit song: "Will You Love Me in December like You do in May? ", met chorus dancer Betty Compton at the musical "Okay" and fell in love. His romancing his mistress openly in front of New York Society, not to mention in front of his wife, is the scandal of the Roaring 20's. Forced to resign as mayor after a probe unearthed volumes of corruption within his administration Jimmy tried once more to run for mayor against Fiorello Laguardia in 1933. But he was blocked by the Roman Catholic Cardinal of New York and NY Governor Franklin Roosevelt, who had just become president and found Walker an embarrassment. Jimmy Walker and Betty Compton lived in Europe for the next ten years. In 2000 married NY Mayor Rudy Giuliani lost the chance to run for the US Senate in part because he made open appearances at shows and dinners with his girlfriend, even meeting her in Gracie Mansion while his family was in an adjoining wing.

1929- New York’s Museum of Modern Art opened.

1932-Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s second wife Nadehzda Alleyuieva shot herself, or so the official story said. Their daughter Svetlana later escaped to the U.S.

1943- The first one man show of American abstract painter named Jackson Pollock. Pollock later created his brushless dripping form of painting that earned him the nickname:” Jack the Dripper”.

1950- In Korea two Chinese MIG fighters tangled with US Sabre jets. The first jet-to-jet dogfight.

1952- The Supreme Court upholds a 1922 ruling that Baseball a sport, not a business. Therefore it is exempt from anti-trust laws.

1965- The Days of Our Lives soap opera first premiered on TV.

1966- Former actor, SAG president, HUAC fink and Twenty Mule Team Borax spokesman Ronald Reagan elected Governor of California.

1991- Marion Barry was re-elected Mayor of Washington D.C. despite serving time for smoking crack cocaine. Comedian Chris Rock wondered:” Who did he run against that was so bad you’d rather vote for a crackhead?”

2004- The Second Battle of Faluja began. U.S. Army and Marines had to fight their way back into an Iraqi city they were forced out of the previous April.

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Yesterday’s Question: Why is whiskey in America called Bourbon?

Answer: In Nov 1789 Elijah Craig first distilled whiskey from Indian corn and strained it through a wool blanket. He lived in Bourbon County, Kentucky, so the stuff soon became popularly known as Bourbon. Abraham Lincoln praised Bourbon as the most American of drinks.

Question: Why is whiskey in America called Bourbon?.

Yesterday’s Question: Computers were originally called Difference Engines and Turing Machines. Who named them computers?
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HISTORY FOR 11/7/2008
Birthdays: Francesco Zubaran, Madame Curie, Rev. Billy Graham is 90, Leon Trotsky –real name Lev Bronstein, Albert Camus, Al Hurt, Joni Mitchell, Joan Sutherland, Judy Tenuda, Clive Barnes

1783- The last public hanging at London’s Tyburn Hill, where executions of commoners had been going on since 1196. Today the Tyburn area is called Marble Arch.

1805- “Oh Joy of Joys!” explorers Lewis and Clark first see the Pacific.

1811- Battle of Tippicanoe- General William Henry Harrison defeats Tecumseh and his united Indian tribes in a battle that decided the ownership of the Old NorthWest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan ). When Harrison later ran for the Presidency with James Tyler, his slogan was "Old Tippicanoe and Tyler Too!"

1865- The London Gazette is founded.

1872- The S.S. Mary Celeste sets sail from New York bound for Italy. The ship was later found mid ocean with the crew and passengers mysteriously gone....

1876- THE STOLEN ELECTION- The Presidential election between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford Hayes was declared a dead heat. Tilden had actually won an overwhelming majority in the popular vote, but when did that ever matter in Washington politics? The electoral votes were even, so Republicans forced the issue to be decided by the House of Representatives. In the meantime they made a secret deal with former Confederate territories that were not allowed to vote that if they would vote for Hayes they could come back into the Union as States again. The Hayes government also promised to slow down civil rights for African Americans and withdraw occupying troops from the South. On March 3rd 1877 with the aid of the new electoral votes of Louisiana, Georgia and Florida Republican Rutherford Hayes was declared the winner. Republicans chanted: “Hooray for Hayes and Honest Ways!” while Democrats protested: “RutherFRAUD Hayes !”

1876- Three crooks try a scheme to break into President Abraham Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield Illinois while everyone was distracted by the presidential election. They planned to hold the remains hostage for money. But their scheme was foiled because nascent Secret Service had an informer among the gang and he tipped off the feds as the hoodlums were prying the lid off the sarcophagus. Lincoln’s bones stayed put.

1914- THE MASS MOONING OF TSING-TAO- Japan had joined the allied side in World War One to attack German colonial holdings in China. The British Navy helped the Japanese Army attack the biggest German fortress in Asia, Tsingtao, home of their famous brewery, built in 1896. The surrendering Germans were angry that the British, their fellow white Europeans, with whom they had stomped the Chinese nationalists together, would aid another Asian race against them. Hadn’t that Englishman- Kipling wrote that poem about the “White Man’s Burden”? As the British troops marched in with the Japanese, the German P.O.W.'s executed a smart about-face, dropped trousers and executed a smart "group-mooning".

1917- RED OCTOBER, THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION- As the guns of the battleship Aurora boomed out across Petrograd (St. Petersburg) Lenin's Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace and overthrew the provisional government of A.P. Kerensky ( who died in Queens, New York in 1973.) Two Bolsheviks sent to take over the Petrograd telephone exchange had forgot to bring their weapons but succeeded nonetheless.
In the ten months between the Tsar’s fall and the Communist coup Russia had tried to govern itself with a fragile democracy. But no middle class support base, powerful extremists like elitist officer corps and landless peasants pulling on either side and the disastrous decision to stay in the Great War with Germany doomed the government. It was said Kerensky was a brilliant speaker but he had no serious plans or ideas beyond ebullient oratory. He was making it all up as he went along. Red Army leader Leon Trotsky ( real name Lev Bronstein ) had at one point lived in exile in New York. This day a Bronx newspaper proudly put as it's headline:" Bronx Boy Seizes Power in Russia !"

1937- Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels sent an emissary to Paris to talk Marlena Dietrich into coming home. But Germany’s greatest movie star hated the Nazis and all they stood for.

1944- President Franklin Roosevelt won an unprecedented Fourth Term as president, even though Democratic party insiders knew he was dying. After FDR the conservative Congress created a constitutional amendment barring anyone else from having more than two terms. Roosevelt joked this night with friends:” You know, the first twelve years are always the hardest. “

1945- The Weisbaden Mainfesto- at the end of World War Two thousands of priceless works of art plundered from museums across Europe were hidden by the Nazis in salt mines in Bavaria. The victorious Americans sent a squad of art curators to catalog the treasures, then were ordered to secretly ship them back to the U.S.. This order morally troubled the team, and a Colonel Obermeyer and a Captain William Farmer wrote a protest petition to the War Department and published it, saying we would be no better than the Nazis themselves if we took the artwork. Washington gave in to the embarrassment and the 200 works of Durer, Raphael, Titian and more were returned to their proper museums.

1956- Eugene O’Neill’s biographical masterpiece play “Long Days Journey into Night” first premiered.

1957- Communist East Germany debuted the Trabant automobile. Trabants or “Trebbies” quickly entered legend alongside Yugos and Edsels as one of the worst cars ever made. Eastern Europeans spent many happy hours on the side of the road trying to get them running and making dozens of Trebbie jokes. “Did you hear the Ministry of going to make Trebbies with dual extra long exhaust pipes? Why? Because then after it breaks down, at least you can use it as a wheelbarrow.”

1962- After losing the California Governor's race to Pat Brown, Richard Nixon bitterly says to assembled newsmen and women:" You boys have been having a lot of fun....well, You won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore..". Nixon felt his career in politics was in shambles and a final jab from the Kennedys was the news he was being audited by the IRS.
Tricky Dick spent the next few years reinventing himself before making his successful Presidential run in 1968.

1963- The movie “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World” premiered at Hollywood’s new Cinerama Dome theater.

1965- the first Pillsbury Doughboy commercial debuted. ‘Tee-hee-hee!”

1965- Dorothy Kilgallen was a New York socialite who’s witty sparring with Bennett Cerf and other panelists enlivened a CBS quiz show called What’s My Line.
But beyond that role she was an accomplished reporter and columnist who uncovered facts on the famous Dr. Sam Shepard murder case. In mid 1965 she announced publicly that she knew the real facts on the John F Kennedy assassination and she had interviewed Jack Ruby. She would shortly announce her proof of conspiracy in a new book .
This night she had dinner with friends then asked them to drop her off at the Regency Hotel Lobby where she was meeting a new mysterious boyfriend. Next morning police found her dead body in her bed at her Greenwich Village apartment. Pills and liquor were strewn about her night table and a book was in her lap so police assumed she took too many sleeping pills and liquor. But conspiracy buffs point out she never read without her reading glasses which were across the room. Her files were confiscated by the Justice Department and never released.

1980- Rebellious actor Steve McQueen died of cancer at age 50.

1991- “Even Me”-Los Angeles Laker Basketball star Irvin “Magic” Johnson admitted to the world that he was HIV –positive. He said he got it from casual sex and was retiring from the NBA. Coming soon after the death of movie star Rock Hudson , Magic Johnson’s example brought home to the world that HIV/AIDS wasn’t merely a “gay plague” but that straight people could get it too. His life is also an example that an HIV positive person can still lead a full productive life.

1997- Someone published a stolen home video of Baywatch star Pamela Anderson and rock star Tommy Lee having graphic sex on their honeymoon, not to mention Tommy steering his boat with his John-Thomas. The Pamela-Tommy video became the most downloaded file on the Internet and rented video in history. In 1998 Pamela Anderson Lee was the subject of 1% of the Total Traffic on the entire World Wide Web!

2000-THE DEADLOCKED ELECTION- Al Gore and George W. Bush electoral votes came to a statistical dead heat. In 1960 with a population of 150 million Kennedy beat Nixon by 60,000 votes. In 2000 with over 250 million Gore and Bush were separated by 140 votes! With nothing in the Constitution about a European style second round of voting. the decision was made in courts and precincts of Palm Beach Florida. Americans learned to study chads and dimples on punchcard butterfly ballots. Katherine Harris the Attorney General of Florida who validated the election for Bush was also the Republican campaign chair in that area. In 2004 an outraged Florida voter drove his Cadillac up onto the sidewalk and tried to run her over. Finally after 36 days the Supreme Court ended all recounts and declared Bush the winner. Other highlights of the election included Hilary Rodham Clinton became the first former First Lady to win an election to the US Senate, Alabama became the last state to rescind it’s laws barring interracial marriage and Missouri elected a dead man senator over an incumbent. The incumbent, John Ashroft, was made by President G.W. Bush attorney general.
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Yesterday’s Question: Computers were originally called Difference Engines and Turing Machines. Who named them computers?

Answer: Originally the people who handled the figures fed into and received from the computers were called Computers. In 1941, the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) built at the Univ of Iowa was the first electronic digital computing device to be called a Computer.

Question: Computers were originally called Difference Engines and Turing Machines. Who named them computers?

Yesterday’s Question Answered Below: Why is strict discipline sometimes called Prussian?
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History for 11/6/2008
Birthdays: Sophocles 495BC., Joanna La Loca (the Mad- 1479), John Phillip Sousa, Joseph Smith the founder of the Mormons, Ignacz Paderewski, Charles Dow of Dow Jones, Adolphus Sax inventor of the Saxophone, James Naismith the inventor of Basketball, Mike Nichols, Edsel Ford, Ed Rehberg, Sally Field is 62, Ray Coniff, John Olsen of the comedy duo Olsen & Johnson, Harold Ross the founder of the New Yorker magazine, Maria Shriver is 53, Ethan Hawke, Rebecca Romjin

Today is the Feast of Saint Leonard of Noblac, the Patron of Women in Labor and Prisoners of War. -is there a connection there..?

1528-Conquistador Alva Nunez Cabeza de Vaca was shipwrecked on the coast of Texas. The first European to set foot in Texas. Cabeza de Vaca means Head of a Cow.

1566-Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe got his nose cut off in a duel. Thereafter he wore a gold cup over the scar held in place by a string .

1730- King Frederick William Ist of Prussia has General Von Katte, the gay lover of his son Crown Prince Frederick, beheaded by saber. He even made his horrified son to watch the execution from a window. Young Frederick was never that fond of his dad after this. When the old sadist died he became King Frederick the Great and slept with whomever he liked. Frederick William Ist was the originator of mechanically strict Prussian discipline that made the German Army famous. He was so feared by his subjects that they used to run away when he arrived. The king caught one wretch in a doorway and drubbed in the face with his cane shouting: "WHY ARE YOU AFRAID? YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO LOVE ME-YOU SCUM!"

1793- The youngest brother of King Louis XVI of France, the Duc d'Orleans, tried to survive the Revolution by repudiating his birthright, changing his name to Phillipe Egalitie', he even voted to execute his own brother. Well, it didn't work. Today he too went to the guillotine. His son would rule France in 1830-1848 as King Louis Phillipe. His palace, the Palais Orleans originally built by Cardinal Richelieu, also known as the Palais Royale goes from private ownership to property of the Nation.

1812- On this day during Napoleons Retreat from Moscow, it began to snow.

1860- Abraham Lincoln of Illinois won the presidency of the United States. The first Republican to win an election.

1869- Rutgers beat Princeton 6-4 in the first college football game.

1916- The elderly cowboy showman Buffalo Bill made his next to last public appearance in El Paso Texas. El Paso had been as wild and bloody a frontier town as Deadwood or Tombstone, but now it was a quiet modern city. Telephone and electricity wires crisscrossed overhead and streetcars clattered down the streets where gunfighters once shot it out. Buffalo Bills parade seemed to make plain to all the final passing of the Old West to the New. The wild cheers brought tears running down the old scout's long white mustache. It was a fitting final bow. He died of prostate cancer within a few weeks.



1936-The Screen Children's Guild chartered.

1941- In an evening nationwide radio broadcast Comrade Josef Stalin told the Soviet Union that although Russian losses were heavy the Germans had already lost 4.5 million men and were on the run. It was all pure fiction In reality Leningrad was surrounded, Moscow was threatened and almost 40% of Russia’s population was under Nazis occupation.

1947- The North Atlantic Treaty Organization- NATO created.

1975- First appearance of the band the Sex Pistols.
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Yesterday’s Question: Why is strict discipline sometimes called Prussian?

Answer: The area of North Germany between Berlin and Poland was originally called the Margrave of Brandenburg. It was later the Kingdom of Prussia. This state became the center around which the scattered parts of Germany united. The second Prussian King Frederick William created the brutally efficient German army. See above- 1730.

From U-Tube. Bravo. Kinda brings a tear to my eye..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPxP8WwmMJg&feature=related

In my lifetime I can recall nine U.S. Presidents, back to JFK. After years of political mice, it is so great to feel what it is like to be under a great president again. Up until yesterday, I feared for America's decline. As someone who has studied history a lifetime, I wondered if I would live to see America's final fall.

Now I feel hopeful and proud. I am proud of everyone who voted. I am proud that the land of my birth, the North East U.S. put Barack on the road to victory, and my second home on the West Coast gave him the victory.

I am especially proud of all the young people who rejected old arguments and prejudices. Pundits said the young would rather text than bother to vote. They made the difference. I know the next few years will be tough on a national level. President Obama is being left a mess almost as vast as that which faced Franklin Roosevelt. But like FDR, I think we at last have a leader.

Doris Kearns Goodwin said that she was jealous of all the young people, to be living in such exciting times. Congratulations!

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Question: Why is strict discipline sometimes called Prussian?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: Was any U.S. president ever elected unanimously?
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History for 11/5/2008
Birthdays: Eugene V. Debs, Art Garfunkel, Roy Rogers, Tatum O'Neill, Elke Sommer, Ike Turner, Vivien Leigh, Will Durant, Joel McCrea, Sam Shepard is 65, Bill Walton, John Berger, Sean Puffy- Combs, Tilda Swinton

In Jolly Old England it is
HAPPY GUY FAWKES DAY! in -1605 Sir Guy Fawkes, a Catholic nobleman, was caught digging a tunnel under the English Parliament and filling it with gunpowder. His goal was no less than blowing up the King and the entire blinkin' government! Sir Roger Catesby was actually the mastermind of the plot, but Sir Guy gets the fame.
Modern day Brits commemorate this as a kind of April Fools Day with bonfires and merrymaking. Children go from door to door asking : "A penny for Sir Guy, please." But in olden times it was also a let's have a good laugh on the Roman Catholics day.
This is why George Washington was against transplanting the holiday in America. Pope Day was celebrated in some American colonies but it died out after the Revolution. In 1775 Washington called it : A ridiculous and childish festival, burning effigies of the Pope." Many English folks I know told me they celebrate the day they tried to blow up the government because wouldn't things have been lovely if he had succeeded!

1805- The Royal Spanish Governor of New Mexico, Joaquin del Real Alencaster, dispatches a cavalry troop under Don Pedro Vial on a secret mission. On this day Vial's force is attacked by hostile Indians on the Arkansas River. Vial drives off the Indians but his command is too battered by the fight to continue and has to return, their mission aborted. What was their mission? To kill or capture the American explorers Lewis and Clark. The Spanish government in Madrid knew full well the object in the American President Jefferson’s mind in sending this "scientific" expedition to find a land route to the Pacific, over territory Spain still claimed, despite the Louisiana Purchase. Lewis and Clark, at this point in the Columbia River Gorge, were unaware of the drama around them.

1830- The day after leading a protest march in Rochester Woman’s Rights advocate Susan B. Anthony defied the law by casting a vote in a New York election.

1940- President Franklin Roosevelt was re-elected to an unprecedented 3rd term. His defeated Republican opponent- Wendell Wilkie, became the butt of jokes in many Looney Tunes.

1946- Two punk kids fresh out of the Navy were elected to the US House of Representatives- John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

1954- THE WRONG DOOR RAID- Baseball great Joe DiMaggio was stewing over the collapse of his marriage to sexy movie star Marilyn Monroe. He was especially sensitive to the rumors that she was seeing other men. This night Joltin Joe was having dinner with Frank Sinatra and a few friends when a detective brought him a report that Monroe’s car was spotted parked in front of an apartment complex on Kilkea Dr.. Enraged, he drove out to the building and kicked in the back door hoping to catch her en-flagrante. But Marilyn was staying in a girlfriend’s apartment upstairs. This was the home of a terrified old lady named Mrs Florence Klotz. We don’t know what she thought about her door suddenly kicked in by Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra and the RatPack but the tabloids had a field day.

1975- Logger Travis Walton was abducted by aliens and experimented on for five days, then returned to his Snowflake Arizona home. Walsh published a bestseller Fire in the Sky.

1977- George W. Bush married Laura Welsh. Laura was once a Democrat who campaigned for lefty George McGovern in 1972.

1979- National Public Radio’s news show Morning Edition started.

1990- In New York City the founder of the Jewish Defense League, Rabbi Meir Kahane, was assassinated by a Moslem fundamentalist. The JDL was an extremist organization that advocated tough responses to Arab extremism. Even though he was elected to the Israeli Knesset Meir Kahane was refused a seat because of his racist views. So no one was too surprised that he was a target. But what was surprising was that the assassin, El Sayyid Nossair, was a member of a terrorist cell operating in the US. His apartment was a "treasure-trove of information" according to NYPD detectives. They found terrorist manuals written in Afghanistan, bomb making instructions and plans to NY city landmarks. The NYPD turned over all this intelligence to the FBI, who filed it and promptly forgot about it.

1994- Retired President Ronald Reagan gave his last public speech. He confirmed he had Alzheimers Disease.

1995- YTSCHAK RABIN ASSASSINATED- At a peace rally after making a speech where he declared "Violence will undermine Israeli Democracy" Israeli Prime Minister Ytschak Rabin was shot and killed by a young Yeshiva student Ygail Amir. Amir was mad at Rabin for daring to make peace with the Palestinians. The night before Amir attended a Likud political rally where people waved pictures of Ytschak Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Ironically Rabin as chief of staff of the Israeli army was one of the strategists of the conquest of the West Bank. President Clinton was shocked by the act and said goodbye in Hebrew "Shalom, Haver" –Peace Brother. Despite this slogan becoming a popular bumper sticker, in the next election Likud won anyway.

1999- A man was arrested in Minneapolis for stealing and keeping 150 shopping carts in his apartment.
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Yesterday’s Question: Was any U.S. president ever elected unanimously?

Answer: George Washington in his second term. In 1818 the election was so boring, President James Monroe ran for his second term unopposed. Yet he voted against himself. “So no one could claim to have been elected unanimously, except George Washington.” He declared.